Jul 24 Blood Money: China’s Profit from Persecution

In 1980, the Chinese government reduced health care spending from 36 percent to 17 percent at a time when the country’s need for a larger, low-cost health care system was on the rise. The cuts resulted in hospital closures and a widespread health care crisis that plagued rural China in particular. The government found a ghoulish source of funding when it began its crackdown on Falun Gong in 1999, quickly making its practitioners the primary target of organ pillaging. The money from organ transplants has since become a vital source of funds for Chinese hospitals, and an issue that calls into question the morality of globalism in our shrinking world.

Falun Gong, a religious belief system developed by a man named Li Hongzhi, comprised meditation exercises and moral philosophy, with a focus on moral rectitude; abstaining from alcohol, drugs, or sexual relations outside marriage, and the admonishment of consumerism. Li distinguished his system by refusing to accept payment for his teachings and Falun Gong quickly amassed a large following.

The decentralized nature of Falun Gong—there are no bishops, imams, or Lamas—made it impossible for the Communist Party to install a puppet head with which they could exert control over the religion, as the government has done in the past. The government’s inability to subvert Falun Gong, coupled with the ideologically sanctioned hatred of communism toward religion, placed the millions of Falun Gong practitioners at odds with the Chinese government. Indeed, by 1999, the Chinese government estimatedthat Falun Gong had approximately 70 million adherents, including high-ranking Party officials and members of Ministry of Public Security.

Faced with a growing number of peaceful protests that mobilized thousands of adherents against the Communist Party, the Chinese government created the 610 Office. Directed by top leadership within China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the 610 Office was tasked with the systematic eradication of Falun Gong and its practitioners.

The 610 Office employed a multifaceted strategy of propaganda, surveillance and intelligence, and direct action to discredit, track down, and imprison Falun Gong practitioners. Worst of all, the Chinese government used the 610 Office to make a profit of persecution by the extraction and sale of organs from imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners.

An investigative report comprised Chinese government documents and whistleblower statements concluded that since 2000, approximately 1.5 million organ transplants have taken place in which the Falun Gong were the source, with an average of 60,000-100,000 transplants per year. In unspeakable cruelty, China has reduced the value of an innocent human being to approximately $300,000, granted that all of their organs are successfully harvested.

The Chinese government has refuted all allegations of organ pillaging, and has banned reports that state otherwise from the country. However, one must wonder how China managed to reduce the average waiting time for an adult kidney transplant to just 15 days since 2000. The average waiting times for the U.S., U.K., and Canada are 1825, 1095, and 2255 days, respectively. Emergency liver transplants can be carried out within 72 hours in China. The rapidity and frequency in which China is able to perform transplants is implicit of a vast on-demand supply of organ donors.

The Chinese government paradoxically claims that it will move away from harvesting organs from executed prisoners and transition into a voluntary system. However, if the Chinese government has managed to successfully harvest and sell the organs of each of the estimated 1.5 million victims at $300,000 per person, then this is a business that may have generated upwards of $450 million for the Chinese healthcare system. To believe that a government that has profited so much from the annihilation of its own people will suddenly have a change of heart is laughable.

China’s crimes against Falun Gong is their worst PR nightmare and they know it, so they continue to half-heartedly placate the West. The Communist Party of China fears the Falun Gong because throughout a nearly two-decade long crusade against them, the Falun Gong have silently and peacefully endured unspeakable suffering. They have not called for revolt, they have not struck out in self-defense, they have simply kept their faith and died for it.

As the Western world partners more closely with China in the name of globalism, it should be wary of condoning the oppression of innocents by silent indifference to their plight in the name of profit.